Jeremayakovka

Thinking Like A Communist Thinking Like A Nazi To Catch A Thief Called History

I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe.

Some notes here from my recent read of Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, a pressing meditation about European Communists on the run in WWII even more from Stalin than from Hitler.

True to the concerns of this itinerant Communist's other written works -- humming with a force vitale that ranges from the polemical to the historical to the poetic, taken together they comprise some of the 20th Century's most "committed" literature -- the energies at stake in this novel are political and, above all, psychological. From page one unsettled characters are on the run and remain so for five years (1940-45), in four countries, on two continents, and through 340 pages. They juggle aliases and addresses while beset by trenchant reassessments -- sometimes shared, often private -- of the state of the Class Struggle In A Time Of War.

Come to think of it, a tantalizing twist on Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon would be had Serge managed to compress his tale into one continuous narrative rather than four successive ones. The novel could then be titled (more intensely, likely, and certainly with more economy) Unforgiving Hours. As it stands, the narrative offers two sections whose major machinations unfold amid real warfare, but where battle is but the backdrop -- the mise en abîme of Leningrad under Wehrmact seige, and later the fin de Reich leveling of the city of Altstadt before its American liberation.

Serge's primary purpose is not martial, but civil. For a ruthless agitator, he stares with considerable sympathy into the fragile frontiers of everyday minds overrun by extraordinary, totalitarian ideologies. One passage especially near the end of the Altstadt section struck me. Here an elderly Nazi school instructor speaks his mind to an American journalist:

"A very great people the Americans ... The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war ... On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition..."
"You think so?"
"Beyond a doubt.... You will realize that in fifty years."
"Phew, we got time to turn around then."
(p. 263)

In these lines is the crux of the "culture war" we came to by the 1990s -- stoked by the "adversary culture" (which Norman Podhoretz elaborated in The Bloody Crossroads), then superseded by the "counterculture" -- which rages and festers today. These lines are also, let it be noted, nearly identical to those which "The Philospher of Islamic Terror," Sayyed Qutb, drew in the sand during his nearly identical years in America. Yet note as well the journalist's reflexive, rolling-up-our-sleeves, can-do attitude. Only in America can history be -- or, to a European, seem, at least in part -- neither pathetic nor heroic.

So much of 20th Century European history is unpardonable, yet so much of 21st Century American history remains unfinished.

Christianity and Culture and War

Continuing to track down sources of recent reads, this week I acquired a copy of  T. S. Eliot's Christianity and Culture (1948). The collection of lectures and essays is referenced in Pat Buchanan's The Decline of the West (2000) (see previous post), also Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996).

Eliot's abiding concern here is to make Christianity central to Western nations during the modernist era. He does not intend any "social justice" agenda. He does not advocate a faith that would conform to conditions created by modernization -- technology, political liberalism, and "the mob." This last phrase (Eliot's word choice) is similar to what Ortega y Gasset scrutinized in The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Eliot affirms, rather, a particular and enduring power for Christianity. Yet it's not a preacher's sermon, elaborating on scripture. Nor is it the feminist critique of pacifism that is Virgnia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938), nor the decadent road recits, of Greece and America (respectively), that are Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). 

The first half of the book, "The Idea of Christianity," was originally a series of lectures he delivered in early 1939. They conclude with remarks referencing the Czechoslovakia crisis Hitler had provoked the previous year, the one "resolved" by the now infamous Munich Agreement and Chamberlain's fallacious declaration of "Peace in our time."
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The term "democracy," as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike -- it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

I believe that there must be many persons, like myself, who were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. It was not a disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to disagreement with policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance, and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends? Such thoughts as these formed the starting point, and must remain the excuse, for saying what I have to say.
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Note well, from Eliot's postscript to this (dated September 6, 1939):
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[T]he possibility of war, which has now been realised, was always present to my mind.

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A Place To Rest Isn't Given Us

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Holy spirits, you walk up there
    in the light, on soft earth.
            Shining god-like breezes
                  touch upon you gently,
                         as a woman's fingers
                               play music on holy strings.
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Like sleeping infants the gods
      breathe without any plan;
        the spirit flourishes continually
            in them, chastely kept,
                         as in a small bud,
                                and their holy eyes
                                       look out in still
                                              eternal clearness.
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A place to rest
    isn't given to us.
          Suffering humans
                decline and blindly fall
                       from one hour to the next,
                              like water thrown
                                    from cliff to cliff,
                                         year after year,
                                               down into the Unknown.
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-- "Hyperion's Song of Destiny" by Friedrich Hölderlin.
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Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

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For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

The Heart of Germanness

Heartpiece
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ONE: May I put my heart at your feet.
TWO: As long as you don' t soil my floor.

ONE: My heart is pure.
TWO: We'll see to that.

ONE: I can't get it out.
TWO: You'd like me to help you.

ONE: If you don't mind.
TWO: It's my pleasure. I too can't get it out.

ONE: (CRIES)
TWO: I'll take it out by surgery.
What do I have a penknife for.
We'll get this in a minute.
To work and not despair.
Well, it's done.
But this is a brick.
Your heart is a brick.

ONE: But it beats only for you.
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- Heiner Müller (1929-95)
from Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, Carl Weber, ed.

Older Poem - "Kafka"

.....................Kafka


.....................those eyes
.....................dark and bright
.....................deep set
.....................in a chiseled
.....................visage

.....................two shining
.....................black lamps
.....................lit by the flame
.....................that shone
.....................through stone
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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* Wrote it about ten years ago. It started out as a sentence in a journal entry that shattered, then set, into this little verbal crystal.

* I've blogged very little about Jeremayakovka's three great inspirations (Jeremiah, Mayakovsky, Kafka). The spiritual nourishment, however, that generating and offering "An Open Letter To Matt Sanchez" recently provided is akin to what this offers. Or to what this is evidence of.

* I'm not nearly as read in Kafka as are the professional litterateurs. His Diaries I find the most compelling, followed by his short prose, and only then by his novels. None of the novels have I read through to the end. (They just don't sustain my attention, can't say why.)

* The first (also lasting) impression Kafka made on me was thanks to an exhibit devoted to him at The Jewish Museum in New York during the 1980s. I didn't visit. It's just that every weekday of its duration our high school track team ran past that museum on the way to Central Park for our workout. The photo of Kafka that appears above figured prominently on the posters the museum had designed to advertise its exhibit. As one among many, mostly hale and hearty, mostly privileged, mostly Jewish, teenaged American boys, I would feel -- while fleetingly and somehow ashamedly looking up to watch -- Kafka watch us rush past him.

* Kafka, like Orwell, would doubtless have felt entirely violated had he lived to see his name neologized (Kafkaesque, Orwellian, etc.). As death closed in on him, he (now) famously demanded that his unpublished works be destroyed, a demand his best friend disobeyed. So the act of reading Kafka is, almost always, a conspicuous betrayal of his exceedingly private, ever-receding spirit. (Ever-receding as a man; as an author (auctor (Lat.): increase) he is diffusely immanent, ever-exodic.) Can someone say how many German lit professors and postmodern literary philosophers ever really (morally) weigh this? Of the ones who do, how many succeed in conveying that to their classroom charges? For to be visited and nourished by a (living) literary corpus is entirely different from swarming around and feeding upon a (dead) literary corpse. Given the nihilistic taint (if not intent) of postmodernism, how many are even capable of that? Or even care to? Or rather: How few?

* This is why, despite the leonine tendencies I sometimes display on Jeremayakovka, I always approach, always take leave of Kafka ... in silence.
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Stormin' Norman's New Novel

Self-described "Left Conservative" Norman Mailer has a hefty new novel out which speculates that incest, molestation, and (other) child abuse turned Adolf Hitler into Adolf Hitler. When Debbie Schlussel heard about The Castle in the Forest, she shot it down in six words:

Pop psychobabble absolves the H0locaust!? OY.

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Ow!
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Now while I haven't read TCITF and am not going to for a while (certainly not before it appears in paperback), I don't grudge Stormin' Norman for trying figure out Little Adolf. Having already come out with his "Jesus novel" -- reinterpreting Christ seems to be a late-career project of at least a few left-leaning novelists (Kazantzakis, Saramago) -- there can't be that many subjects left which Norman Mailer finds compelling. Still, my gut reaction to hearing about this project was little more than a shrug.

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As I wrote in the comments at Debbie's post (only slightly modified here):

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[Mailer's] intellect will roam, but rarely will it hit home.

[Although Jewish himself,  his] protagonists typically are anything but Jewish, or else only partly or vaguely so (as in An American Dream and Harlot's Ghost). They are obsessed with power, whether political or interpersonal (esp. between men & women), usually both. All this describes Adolf Hitler to a tee. Now that I think about it, I'm surprised Norman never got around to Adolf before.

Writing about Hitler's childhood is curious but not brave. Nor is it necessarily relevant, certainly not in terms of the "great American novel" expectation that has trailed Mailer around throughout his career:

1) Hitler's dead and gone.

2) Fascism is less an enemy of liberal democracy than the many varieties of socialism (Baathist, Castroite, Chavista, Sandinista, and of course, the academic kind).

In brief, Adolf Hitler was more of a genius -- and more evil -- than Norman Mailer ever was or will be. And that may make Norman jealous.

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The sequel to Harlot's Ghost -- that's his next, and possibly last, novel to which I'm looking forward.

To begin to figure out Stormin' Norman, Gentle Reader, (let alone Little Adolf), I direct you to how nearly 25 years ago James Baldwin summed up his wayward old friend. Norman stopped being a writer, he said, and became a celebrity. And that, I believe, refers to the Norman Mailer of nearly 50 years ago.

OY! and OW!

And you know just how suspect fame is to JMK.

Previous: "' The Last 4th of the 20th Century" or, Storming Stormin' Norman Mailer"

Meet The Roaming Berlinskis

Menace in Europe, Claire Berlinski's 2006 journalistic study of Europe's demographic (and increasingly Muslim) landscape, is now out in paperback. If you're a critical Europhile, as I am, Menace is a must-read.

Here's an interview she gave on Wisconsin Public Radio about a year ago, when the first book debuted in hardcover. Good for public radio, good for her, and hopefully, Gentle Reader, good for you. Claire's a sharp interviewee who engages with upbeat erudition "the deep confusion in the European soul." (Or, as my erstwhile idol, playwright Heiner Müller once waxed dramatically, "His sword is broken. His sword has broken him.")
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Claire and younger bro' Mischa were interviewed earlier this month over at Pajamas Media, where they trot out their brand new, globetrotting novels, Lion Eyes (Claire's) and Fieldwork (Mischa's). One is an intelligent romance of international intelligence involving the internet, Iran, and the CIA. The other is a detective story of the coming together of Christianity and animism in the wilds of Thailand. Anthropologists of the world, loosen up! might be one of its implicit messages.

Now while ugliness does exist, it is neither exclusively nor largely American (something which would, no doubt, consternate Graham Greene). Lion Eyes and Fieldwork look like fresh American takes on our undeniably international Zeitgeist. The Berlinskis' distinct but oh-so-related imaginative terrains prove that roaming intellects gather no despair.

She Wasn't An Angel, But ....

Oh, no. One of JMK's muses is dead.

A casual mention last night of the melancholic, romantic German art-house hit film Wings of Desire (1987) led to my discovery that the lead actress, Solveig Dommartin, died last month of a heart attack at age 45.

I saw Wings of Desire twice in one week around the time it was first released, when I was still a teenager at age 18 going on 100. Her performance was a fleshy touchstone that set off intangible sparks. The credo of romantic love -- which Marion (Solveig's character) recounts to Damiel in the underground bar after the Nick Cave set -- became my own.

From an interview she gave:

It's the beauty of the heartfelt truth that enables you to move forward, and live and make of each day a new miracle and make a wonder of life itself. And for me, that's pretty much what Wings of Desire is about.

In addition, Wings of Desire bolstered my mournful, shepherding attitude towards Germany and things German (and towards Eur0pe, generally). I'd already had this mournful, shepherding attitude and have never lost it. It has been tested, but never toppled. (Note, for example, that this blog's essential colors are the German national colors.)

The obit said she died of a "heart attack," but who knows what really happened...? I'm still in shock, obviously.

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Here's the bar scene.

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Their last loneliness: the hypnotizing scene shortly before they hook up, during the performance of Nick Cave's "Six Bells Chime."

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What he fell in love with: the burlesque gymnastics of that despairing daring young woman on the flying trapeze.

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I know now what no angel has ever known. --Damiel

More Mel

Well, talk about bad taste!

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"Springtime for Hitler" is one of the funniest, most memorable musical numbers Hollywood has ever produced. That's why The Producers won Mel Brooks the 1968 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and thirty-five years later spawned the phenomenally popular revival on Broadway and, once more, in Hollywood. Good for Mel, good for JMK, good for you, Gentle Reader. Yet watching "Springtime for Hitler" again -- thinking of recent posts about of Ahmedinejad in Iran, anti-semitism in the UK, and apathy in the US -- helps me put my finger on a reservation I've always had about that musical number and about political comedy generally.

These promotional materials from The Producers DVD, a couple of on-camera clips of Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, helped, too. Looking back as old men now on their first smash comic collaboration (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are the others), they offer some insight into the uses -- and, inadvertently, the limitations -- of political humor and satire. Says Mel (in Windows Media; in Real Player):

The way to deal with despots like Hitler is not to get on a soapbox and fight [them] with rhetoric, but to fight them with ridicule, to laugh at them. To laugh them into oblivion rather than with philosophy or psychology.... You can't win a debate with those guys, that's what they're born to do, but you can certainly make fun of them and laugh them into eternity. [emphases added]

These are the words of one who, besides protecting some consummate comedian turf, is comfortably removed in space and in time from the threat of Adolf Hitler. Or someone who thinks he is. You do have to get on a soapbox and fight them, you do have to debate them, and you do have to win. Yet we know that it's not, in the end, about debating -- it's a fight to the death. So while in a sense Mel is right -- that you cannot debate with people who categorically deny your humanity -- you still have to brave their threat. Evil can never be laughed into eternity, it can only be airbrushed out of the picture momentarily.

"Mel used to say I was the perfect victim," says Gene Wilder in his interview. That strikes me as more funny (peculiar) than funny (ha-ha). So funny that it's sad. A sadness that no amount of ridicule can laugh into eternity....

"Well, talk about bad taste!" exclaims a disgusted audience member as she quits the theater. Exactly. What Mel Brooks laughed into eternity with "Springtime for Hitler" was not the Third Reich but the "fourth wall" behind which a conventional and often complacent theater-going public comfortably sits. It's a worthy accomplishment for Hollywood in 1968, although nowhere near an antidote for Hamburg in 1938 or Haifa in 2008.

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These jottings were kicked into gear by:

* today's Christians United Against the New Anti-Semitism post on the peaceful German majority;

* last week's Solomonia post about Saturday Night Live's spoof of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto; and

* yesterday's post here about Mel Brooks's spoof of the Spanish Inqusition.

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See also today's post by Fausta quoting Mark Steyn on Muslims in television sitcoms.

My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf and A Mea Culpa

* Update (2/18) * Welcome Israpundit readers! Thanks, Ted, for the mention. Your feedback on this, or any "Second Thoughts" post, is welcome.

Arriving in this morning's email from my friend, David Horowitz, was this ten-minute audiovisual primer on the Iranian and Palestinian Holocaust threat, The Islamic Mein Kampf.

I watched it. The didactic advantage of The Islamic Mein Kampf is that it boils down into words and images the precise, deadly, and implacable intentions of radical Islam -- issuing primarily from Iran and Palestine -- vis-à-vis Israel and the United States.

Simply put: They will come for you.

They will come for you.

They will come for you.
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This generation, it won't be a knock on the door or a round up at the train station. Instead it'll be a dirty nuke or a poisoned water supply or more hijacked airplanes or missiles over Tel Aviv.

Learn more about The Terrorism Awareness Project.

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* * *

It's been a long intellectual road over the past ten years, and doing my part to inform people about The Islamic Mein Kampf is the latest step in what hopefully will be a long road to come -- a long road in a different direction. Here are a few words that begin to tell how I got from there to here.

Through the 1990s I dragged with me the remnants of the radical fantasies I'd imbibed while suckling, as a political babe, on the sour milk of Marxism. I actually used to believe that the imposition of a "Palestine" over all the territory of what's now Israel and Judea and Samaria was not only possible but the most humane and egalitarian resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I projected my own, American creeds of fairness and republican egalitarianism onto Arabs (without ever travelling in Arab lands or undertaking to learn, seriously, its history and culture). I studied the die-hard American apologists for anti-Zionism of the 1980s and 1990s, Paul Findley and Noam Chomsky -- and of course Edward Said.

In addition I read very closely Jean Genet (left), the most celebrated French partisan of Arab "resistance" to Israel (and also a partisan of black American "resistance" to "Amerika"). In his last productive writing period he attempted to elevate the PLO to the status of ancient Greek warriors. I translated into English "Violence and Brutality," Genet's passionate but intellectually indefensible 1977 essay in which he gave his poetic blessing to terrorism. Not stopping there, I took this sentiment to its logical extreme by writing poetry modeled after Genet's -- and also East German Heiner Müller's (above, right) -- fascination with the subject, poetry that effectively endorsed the left-wing, pro-PLO terrorism of that era.

That was my "revolutionary" intellectual project: 1) enlist my native American progressive populism to building an intellectual bridge between European terrorism of the 1970s and Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s; and thus 2) making and penetrating a breach in liberal Western letters and forcing the reading public to accomodate itself to this new radical reality. I flattered myself that I would be the avant-garde in print while groups like Hamas would be the avant-garde on the ground.

How did I accommodate myself to the murder of Israeli innocents, you might ask? Simple. I would just mull an occasional phrase from Genet, Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man.... or from Müller, When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you'll know the truth.... Like some little intellectual lozenge, it would reduce the irritation. For a little while.

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* * *

So, what happened? Well, I didn't exactly "go native"; I didn't, for example, join the International Solidarity Movement or start a family with a Palestinian woman (although the opportunities presented themselves). More modestly, I became conversant in a fair amount of Arab literature and film. I subscribed to Al-Jadid magazine. I bought and read the Koran. More practically, I became acquainted with certain Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists here in America.

By coincidence (and later by cultivation) I became chummy with relatives of a former director of the Arab Film Festival, and frequently attended AFF programs. Through a mutual friend I met (and briefly worked for) the radical National Lawyers' Guild and American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee activist Nancy Hormachea. In her practice she often represents asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Iran and Pakistan, although in her political activism she's a staunch opponent of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. By coincidence I was a classmate of Fadia Issam Rafeedie, the author of "An 'Apologia of Radicalism'" who turned her 2000 UC Berkeley valedictorian speech into a most egregious breach of academic decorum when she served as the figurehead of a mass protest, speaking "from her heart" in defiance against the commencement speaker, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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In case you're wondering, there aren't any terribly racy tales of idealism and disillusionment to confess. I think I grew weary, then wary, then scared. I grew weary of hearing simplistic comparisons of the Israeli occupation to Nazism. Can't you do any better than that? I thought, eventually thinking, You know, you need to do better than that.... I grew wary when one of my Arab buddies "apologized" to me in the aftermath of a Hamas suicide (homicide) bombing. Do I really represent Jewry and Israel? For starters, I never, ever claimed to.... Does he represent Hamas(!)? He never claimed to, but -- beyond this being an obvious instance of a young man's conceit -- it seemed to reveal a continuity of opinion among Arabs. It seemed to reveal that possibly there was a divide (or at minimum, some vital difference) between me and them that I ought to not gloss over ... that I ought to work harder at figuring out ... that he also ought to work harder at figuring out....

Something else that added to my wariness was my attendance at a handful of sessions of a Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" that met in the Berkeley Hills. A derivative format of the feminist "consciousness-raising" group of the 1970s (which, as Andrea Dworkin states unapologetically in Heartbreak, was itself inspired by Communist China's Cultural Revolution) this "dialogue group" was overwhelmingly attended by Jews who endlessly professed their good intentions towards Palestinians. Typically a woman would make a somewhat strident speech about men being to blame for the escalation of violence (which, though partly true, is not the whole truth). One time a native-born Israeli woman tried to put into words her dread that Israel would no longer exist. One of the very few Palestinian attendees would affirm the need to understand how hard life under occupation was, and then make a pitch for the rest of us to purchase Palestinian olive oil. No one, however, (including me) dared ask perhaps the most pertinent question, How come so few Palestinians attended the "dialogue group"? The answer, as a Palestinian confidant told me, is that nearly all Palestinians she knew -- for the most part the secular Palestinian Left, the ostensible "partners in peace" -- nearly all of them despise such "dialogue groups." The "dialogue groups" don't accomplish anything. They're much ado about nothing. Or rather, they're very little ado about a whole hell of a lot.

What demonstrated definitively where my anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian sympathy was leading was a telephone conversation I had with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh (right). Shortly after he founded Al-Awda, "The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition," I contacted him to suggest offering some outside support to his effort to secure for the surviving Palestinian refugees of 1948 and all their living descendants the right to patriate within the State of Israel. After confiding to Qumsiyeh my idealistic hope for a "secular, democratic Palestine" he in turn confided that indeed this one-state, not a two-state, solution was his ultimate aim. Here was a meeting of minds I had long hoped for, but it also served as a real (albeit puny) "little drummer girl" moment. There, clear as a bell, was the looking glass. However, I decided not to go through it, and shied away from any further involvement or contact with Al-Awda.

* * *

Most of what I just described happened before 9/11.

Precisely how that day added to the mix I'm not going to get into in this post. By way of beginning to build an intellectual bridge, however, from Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s to neoconservative counter-jihadism of the 21st Century, here are select readings that have made a difference.

In alphabetical order (and, for that matter, in no particular political order):

Berlinski, Claire. Menace In Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism.
Hanson, Victor. An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism.
Hitchens, Christopher. Love, Poverty, and War.
Horowitz, David. Unholy Alliance.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban.
Scheuer, Mark. Imperial Hubris.
Steyn, Mark. America Alone.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower.

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* * *
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So here we are.

If you're already informed on the Iranian and Palestinian threat, then most of what's presented in The Islamic Mein Kampf will already be familiar. No sweat. Please then just take a minute and forward The Islamic Mein Kampf to all your contacts.

And if you believe that Iran, Palestine, and Islamic war against the West are not real, imminent threats, then I hope you watch The Islamic Mein Kampf. Watch it, consider it, and pursue its implications to their logical and moral ends.

May it bring you into a Vast, Classically Liberal Consensus -- which, by dispensing once and for all with left-wing apologies for terrorist tactics and terrorist ideologies -- is the only way the West will ever thwart Palestinian and, as Alexandra reminds, Iranian genocidal designs.

When Ronald Reagan quipped, "We begin bombing in five minutes," he was joking. Ahmedinejad, Nasrallah, Haniyeh -- they're not joking.

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* * *

Related: David Gartenstein-Ross's interview today in FrontPage Magazine, "My Year Inside Radical Islam."

Deutschland D.O.A. in the 21st Century

An AP wire story reproduced here in full:

German population continues to decline
By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press WriterFri Jan 5, 9:07 PM ET

Germany's population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2006 and recorded the biggest drop since the country's reunification in 1990, the government said Friday, days after launching financial incentives designed to stall falling birth rates.

The number of births, meanwhile, was the lowest since World War II.

At the end of 2006, the number of people living in Germany was an estimated 82.3 million, 130,000 below the total at the end of 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said.

Germany's population grew in 2001 and 2002, but has fallen each year since. From 2003-2005 the population dropped by 5,000, 31,000 and 63,000, respectively.

German officials have been reluctant to ease immigration rules to bolster the work force, despite complaints from industry that there are not enough skilled workers in some areas. Demographers and economists say the problem will only grow worse, and that an aging population will put serious strains on pension funding and on the economy for lack of workers.

A recent government study forecast that the population could fall as low as 69 million by 2050.

During 2006, the agency said there were about 675,000 births, down from 686,000 recorded in 2005. The latest figure represents the fewest since World War II and far below the 922,000 births recorded in 1946, when the country lay in ruins after its defeat.

The population decline was also due to a drop in net immigration, from 79,000 in 2005 to between 20,000 and 30,000 last year, officials said.

"Immigration was nowhere near enough to make up for the births deficit," the statistics office said.

Starting Jan. 1, the parents of newborn children are entitled to share up to 14 months of leave from their jobs and receive about two-thirds of their net salaries in a bid to encourage couples to have more children.

The move, designed particularly to help working moms have more children, follows similar moves in other European countries concerned about their aging populations.

# # #

Older Poem - "Appetition"

Wrote this one shortly after returning from Bialystok (see previous post).
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Appetition
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I WANT TO BE
A GERMAN*
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William Tell shot
an arrow
at son's
head
.
metal tip crushed
boy's pate
shaft deep sunk
in tree trunk
.
William Tell savored
the apple
fallen to
ground
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sweeter from
warm blood
.....issue of cold
soft flesh
.....issue of hard
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I AM
THAT BOY

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*: from a Jewish boy's notebook, found in the Warsaw Ghetto after its destruction

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[like all other original text and images on Jeremayakovka, "Appetition" is copyright by the blog's owner]

ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

1. As for this neologism "appetition," the English verbs "appetite" and "petition" derive from the Latin verb "peto, petere," which can contain many meanings: make for, go to; attack, assail; seek, strive after, endeavor; ask for, beg, beseech, request, entreat; fetch, derive from.  It can also describe an arrow in flight, as in, "seeks a target."

2. "Appetition" was originally published in the online magazine Ygdrasil in June 2000, albeit in mutilated form, for the editors lopped off the title when formatting it for their issue.  My introduction to the publishing world -- hmmph!